Abstract
My chapter argues that Stanley Cavell’s work on Wittgenstein and on scepticism provides fresh perspectives on the preoccupation with interiority found in David Foster Wallace’s writings. Through a close reading of Wallace’s short story, “Good Old Neon”, I show how Cavell’s reinterpretation of scepticism in terms of acknowledgement helps to foreground questions of separateness and voice underlying Wallace’s concern with interiority. Seen in this light, such concern does not reflect a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein on Wallace’s part, nor does it articulate a settled epistemological scepticism.
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Notes
- 1.
Jon Baskin makes this point in “Untrendy Problems: The Pale King’s Philosophical Inspirations,” in Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy, ed. Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 143 n6.
- 2.
David Foster Wallace, “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress,” in Both Flesh and Not (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2012), p. 109.
- 3.
David Foster Wallace, “The Empty Plenum,” p. 109 n38.
- 4.
Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1994), p. 34.
- 5.
Stanley Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 2; hereafter abbreviated “MWM.”
- 6.
Stanley Cavell, “Austin at Criticism”, in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 98.
- 7.
Stanley Cavell, “Silences Noises Voices,” in Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, ed. Juliet Floyd and Sanford Shieh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 355; hereafter abbreviated “SNV.”
- 8.
David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon,” in Oblivion (London: Abacus, 2005), p. 178. Hereafter abbreviated GN.
- 9.
Robert C. Jones, for example, finds Wallace’s assumption in “Consider the Lobster” that pain is a “totally subjective experience” to reflect “intuitive, pre-theoretic notions of pain – that access to my own internal pain states is a solely introspective affair involving private, subjective experiences about which my epistemic judgments are immune to error and about which I cannot be wrong” (p. 91n16). I take Jones to be responding here to the Cartesian quality of Wallace’s work. Robert C. Jones, “The Lobster Considered,” in Bolger and Korb, eds., Gesturing Toward Reality, pp. 85–102.
- 10.
See for instance Patrick Horn, “Does Language Fail Us? Wallace’s Struggle with Solipsism,” in Bolger and Korb, eds., Gesturing Toward Reality, pp. 245–70. Horn sees a “deficiency” (p. 248) in Wallace’s understanding of the Investigations. Horn’s Wallace misses the point that late Wittgenstein does not set out to provide arguments as such and so does not offer an argument against solipsism. Rather, Wittgenstein shows that the problem of solipsism is logically muddled and lacks sense. “Wallace thus accepted the sense of a problem that Wittgenstein tried to show could never be sensibly stated” (p. 247). A touchstone for Wallace’s concern with solipsism is his 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery. Wallace contends there that although the Investigations offer a “beautiful” argument against solipsism, its vision of language eventuates in a linguistic solipsism of communal language games – leaving us less alone but no nearer to extra-linguistic referents. David Foster Wallace, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” by Larry McCaffery, in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi, 2012), p. 44. Stephen Mulhall has cautioned that Wallace’s understanding of Wittgenstein is complex and cannot be reduced to linguistic solipsism and/or determinism. See Stephen Mulhall, The Self and its Shadows. A Book of Essays on Individuality as Negation in Philosophy and the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The biblical characterisation of external world scepticism as “a real Book-of-Genesis-type tragic fall” in Wallace’s remarks to McCaffery owes a debt to Cavell’s discussion of scepticism as a secular Fall (p. 44). See Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), pp. 51–52.
- 11.
Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 238–266; hereafter abbreviated “KA.”
- 12.
David Foster Wallace, “Looking for a Garde of Which to be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” by Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk, in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi, 2012), p. 12.
- 13.
Norman Malcolm, “The Privacy of Experience,” in Epistemology: New Essays on the Theory of Knowledge, ed. Avrum Stroll (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 129–58.
- 14.
Cavell, “Austin at Criticism,” p. 109.
- 15.
John W. Cook, “Wittgenstein on Privacy,” The Philosophical Review Vol. LXXIV (1965): 281–314; reprinted in Wittgenstein: The Philosophical Investigations, ed. George Pitcher (New York: Doubleday Anchor Original, 1966), p. 323. Quotation from reprint.
- 16.
David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), p. 81.
- 17.
Stanley Cavell, “Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 129.
- 18.
Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, p. 17.
- 19.
Here as elsewhere in Cavell that “hence” can seem a stretch, a ground implied by a leap, but at a minimum it registers Cavell’s premise that since “philosophy is what thought does to itself”, it is not esoteric. Cavell, “Ending the Waiting Game,” p. 126.
- 20.
Wallace, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” p. 32.
- 21.
See Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially pp. 344–346.
- 22.
Marshall Boswell, “‘The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head’: Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 168.
- 23.
Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Philosophy and Animal Life, ed. Cary Wolfe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 65.
- 24.
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 351.
- 25.
Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), p. 43.
- 26.
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (London: Abacus, 1997), p. 8.
- 27.
Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 13.
- 28.
Cavell, Contesting Tears, p. 43.
- 29.
Paul Giles, “All Swallowed Up: David Foster Wallace and American Literature,” in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, ed. Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), p. 18.
- 30.
Painterly expressionism for Cavell stops short of such an acknowledgment, because it represents our response to this subjectivity (“our terror of ourselves in isolation”) rather than representing this “condition of isolation” from within. On this account, expressionism would “not be a new mastery of fate by creating selfhood against no matter what odds; it would be the sealing of the self’s fate by theatricalizing it. Apart from the wish for selfhood (hence the always simultaneous granting of otherness as well), I do not understand the value of art. Apart from this wish and its achievement, art is exhibition.” Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 22. Although it stems from a very different context, the contrast here between the achievement of selfhood and the theatricalization of the self’s condition finds a certain purchase in “Good Old Neon”. It is not just that Neal is caught up in theatricalization, but also that his supposed fraudulence and self-perpetuating worries about fraudulence stop short of a “granting of otherness”. I find a comparable dynamic in Cavell’s practice of Wittgensteinian dialogue; rather than granting otherness, Cavell’s anticipations and voicings of his reader’s responses risk a pre-emptive effect.
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Jenner, P. (2021). Plights of Mind and Circumstance: Cavell and Wallace on Scepticism. In: Hagberg, G.L. (eds) Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_6
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